Drifting and striding with Geoff Nicholson - author of The Lost Art of Walking, and Walking in Ruinswithcholson, author of Toff Nidrifting and stomping withcholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking, considers the narrower and wider shores of obsessive pedestrianism.

Friday, June 28, 2013

DRIFTING WITH DIDION

Franklin Avenue is one of the less glamorous and less celebrated streets
of Los Angeles. It runs parallel to, and
just a little north of, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards but it lacks their fame
and name recognition, and I’m sure a lot of people think of it simply as an
access road to the freeway. I can’t say
I’m deeply upset about this lack of love, yet a drift along Franklin Avenue reveals
various wonders for the Hollywood Walker.

Franklin starts in the Los Feliz district and runs
west for five miles or so, ending up in the lower Hollywood Hills, at Wattles
Garden Park. Near the eastern end you’ll
see the Shakespeare Bridge, not a genuine architectural folly I suppose, since
it’s a perfectly functional bridge, but its gothic styling is pure decoration. And
you might consider it a distant cousin of the similarly folly-ish Sowdon House a
few miles further along, a “Mayan-revival” house built by Lloyd Wright, son of
Frank.

Franklin Avenue is also the location of the unimprovably
named House of Pies, and of the 101 Coffee Shop which in a previous incarnation
featured in Swingers, a movie that in
general plays cinematic havoc with the geography of east Hollywood and Los
Feliz (characters are seen standing outside one bar but when they go inside
they’re in the interior of a quite different one, that kind of thing). However, Vince Vaughn
and Jon Favreau supposedly wrote the screenplay in the coffee shop, which may
be why they depict it more or less faithfully.

Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in the
Highland Gardens Hotel, at 7047 Franklin, which is next to the legendary
Magic Castle, where magicians of varying degrees of finesse ply their
trade. Gary Cooper lived at 7511
Franklin, with his parents.

But for me, and for others of a literary frame of mind,
Franklin Avenue may be most notable as the street where Joan Didion and her
husband John Gregory Dunne, lived in the late 1960s. Mentions of the "Franklin Avenue house" crop up
in various places in Didion’s work, but most crucially in The White Album, published in 1979.
She tells us that there was a former Canadian embassy on one side, a
center for Synanon (a dubious drug rehabilitation program) on the other. By her own account, things were extremely
freewheeling inside her house, though of course there was a lot of that around
back then.

She
writes, “In the big house on Franklin Avenue many
people seemed to come and go without relation to what I did. I knew where the
sheets and towels were kept but I did not always know who was sleeping in every
bed. I had the keys but not the key. I remember taking a 25-mg. Compazine one
Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people,
many of whom were still around on Monday. … I remember a babysitter telling me
that she saw death in my aura. I remember chatting with her about reasons why
this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows and going to sleep
in the living room."

Things changed however, with the Manson killings and
she and her husband and daughter, Quintana Roo, moved away to safety. Didion said in an interview, “There were a lot of rumors about stuff, a lot of stuff going on around
town, which you would kind of hear about on the edges of your mind and not want
to know any more about. After the fact, it was kind of amazing to see how many
lives had intersected with the Manson Family's … Later, I was interviewing
Linda Kasabian, who was the wheel person -- she wasn't the "wheel
man," she was the "wheel person" -- for the LaBianca murder. I
can't remember. Maybe also for Tate. But anyway, the night they did the
LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to
hit, and that's where we lived, and we had French windows open, lights blazing
all along on the street.”

I walk along various stretches of Franklin Avenue all the time, and once
in a while I’ve thought I might go looking for the Didion house, but it always seemed
too difficult. The only real visual clues I had were in the famous Julian
Wasser photographs of Joan and her yellow Corvette, but all you can see is a
section of wall and a perfectly ordinary looking garage. That didn’t seem nearly enough to go on.

I had also seen a picture
of Didion sitting on a balustrade, but I wasn’t sure it was at the Franklin Avenue
house, and in any case it was apparently in a back garden, and most likely
wouldn’t be visible from the street.

Finding the house was not
a major obsession, and I can’t say I actually craved to find the place, but then I was rereading The Year of Magical Thinking, and found
this passage:

“One night that summer he
(John Gregory Dunne) asked me to drive home after dinner at Anthea Sylbert's
house on Camino Palmero in Hollywood. I remember thinking how remarkable this
was. Anthea lived less than a block from the house on Franklin Avenue in which
we had lived from 1967 until 1971, so it was not a question of reconnoitering a
new neighborhood. It had occurred to me as I started the ignition that I could
count on my fingers the number of times I had driven when John was in the car;
the single other time I could remember that night was once spelling him on a
drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He had been dozing in the passenger seat
of the Corvette we then had. He had opened his eyes. After a moment he had
said, very carefully, ‘I might take it a little slower.’ I had no sense of
unusual speed and glanced at the speedometer: I was doing 120.

I completely remembered the part about her doing 120
but I’d not taken in the reference to Camino Palmero, and now it seemed a
revelation. If they’d lived on Franklin Avenue,
less than a block from Camino Palmero, then surely it couldn’t be too hard to find
the place. I started my drift.

As I walked along Franklin, and approached what I knew
had to be the right area, there were a surprising number of huge houses that
looked like they might have been embassies at some time. Quite
what a Synanon center looked like, I had no idea. But I did notice quite a few big, new
apartment buildings that had clearly been built since 1971, so it seemed
possible that the Didion house might have been demolished in the intervening
years. I did so hope not.

Naturally, some quests
are more prolonged than others, but to cut a short story even shorter, after a
couple of the most minor false starts, I spotted the garage. There was no mistaking it. The two sliding doors had been replaced by a
single up and over, but the tiled roof, the molding below it, the size, and
shape, were quite clearly the same. This
was where Ms. D had parked her yellow Corvette, where she’d stood and posed for
Julian Wasser’s photographs. Eureka.

And what kind of house
was attached to a garage like this?Well, rather a grand one it turned out, perhaps not strictly in the
embassy class, but big and swanky enough for most tastes, and no doubt much
refurbished since the Didion years.Zillow.com, I subsequently discovered, think it’s worth $3.3m.

The front garden gate was
locked, and I wouldn’t have gone in even if it had been open. I take seriously the “armed response” threat
that looms over so many houses in LA.
However, there was a short, open driveway at the side of the house with
parking for a few cars: only one was there now.
By walking to the end of the driveway I’d be able to get a look at the back
garden. I knew from reading my Didion
that her daughter had played a lot of tennis on a court in there. Nobody was going to shoot me just for peering
into the garden were they, surely?

And when I got to the end of the driveway, the garden gate was wide
open and there was a sign that read “Welcome to Shumei Hollywood Garden.” It didn’t exactly look “public,” but an open
gate and a welcome sign says to me “come on inside.” I’d never heard of Shumei: I figured it
wasn’t some Mansonite, or even Synanon style, organization, though I guessed
they were believers of some sort. In I
went.

The garden was big, at least an acre, maybe two, and full of vegetable
beds, in quantity, and elaborately arranged, with irrigation systems and
trellises: it didn’t look like it was just some hobbyist growing a few tomatoes
and onions for his or her own use. There
was no sign whatsoever of a tennis court.
And there was no sign of any people either, nobody working on the garden,
but I assumed there had to be somebody around somewhere because of the car on
the drive. And sure enough after five
minutes or so a lean, delicate, serene young man came out of the house and offered
greetings.

He gave me a very quick run down on Shumei tenets: natural agriculture, art
and beauty, spiritual enlightenment. Shumei,
I’ve since learned, also involves Jyorei “a
healing art that by focusing spiritual light gradually penetrates and dissolves
the spiritual clouds that cause physical, emotional, and personal dilemmas.”
The website has a first person account of a woman who was cured of cancer. But we didn’t
really go into that: actually we had a discussion about gardening. The “natural agriculture” they practice is
just staggering rigorous, no fertilizers, not even the organic kind. I said how amazing it was to find this piece
of lush horticultural land right here, so close to Hollywood Boulevard. Yes indeed, my young man agreed, and apparently
it had once been very different, there’d even been a tennis court. I was ready to swoon.

The young man said he’d only been with Shumei for two
years, and I may have been jumping to conclusions, but I didn’t think he looked
like a Didion reader, so I didn’t turn the conversation that way, but he did
tell me that the Shumei folks had been in residence for 34 years, which would
mean they got there in 1979, some years after the Didion-Dunnes left, but in
fact the same year that The White Album
was published.

I didn’t linger too long,
didn’t want to overstay my welcome, and to be honest I feared I might get roped
in for some enforced spiritual enlightenment, but looking from the garden toward
house I now saw a balustrade, unmistakably the same one that Joan is sitting on
in the picture up above. That pleased me
so much. More than that, finding the
house, finding this curious spiritual oasis, walking around the garden with
this disciple, well, what can I tell you, it all seemed very, very much like
being inside a piece of writing by Joan Didion.

I’ve been reading and loving
Joan Didion’s work for rather a long time now, and as with so many youthful
enthusiasms I sometimes think maybe I’ve outgrown it. But before doing this walk I returned again
to The White Album, and dipped into a
few other books, and the thing that struck me, the thing that so few people say
about Didion: she’s an hilarious, and absolutely deadpan, writer. People make her out to be a kind of Sylvia
Plath. Sometimes I think Anita Loos
would be a better comparison.

Here from The
White Album, again referring to her years in the Franklin Avenue house, “It seems to me now that during those years I was always writing down the
license numbers of panel trucks, panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks
idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table
drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.”

If you don’t find that pretty
darn hysterical, you might as well move to Malibu.

*In the interests of absolutely full disclosure, I should say that Anthony Miller, the well known psychogeographer and author of encyclopedic fictions, accompanied me on the important part of this drift.

8 comments:

Guy, I suspect the first Didion novel you read is going to be the one that hits you most intensely, and stays with you longest. For me that was Play It As It Lays. Good as the other novels are, they never hit me in such a direct and surprising way.

Having just finished rereading Play It As It Lays, I would agree, though I'm often rereading either A Book of Common Prayer or Democracy, and they each bring their own surprises, with moments that feel so alive to me, and even cinematic. (I've puzzled over why Play It As It Lays was made into a film and not the others.) And Geoff, thanks for this piece. I'm an avid Didion reader, who now lives in Santa Monica, and have not walked around Hollywood for what seems ages; I may just have to go in search of Shumei.

I am reading "The White Album" for the first time and decided to try to find a photo of Didion's Franklin house online.It's a beautiful house and probably was even back in the late 1960's when the neighborhood was in decline.I live in West Hollywood & will try to drive by soon.Thanks for the great photos!

Just stumbled across your blog, great writing and walking. I was in LA for a few days, staying near Fountain, was hoping to walk by the Didion/Dunne manse, but couldn't find an address. It may well be in the biography just out about her. I can so relate to youthful enthusiasm, but like the doomed relationship of the Ellis and Jack from "Brokeback Mountain", I just can't quit you, Joan Didion. Nor do I want to. I just found a first edition of "Play it as it Lays" in a bookstore and will be diving in. My all time favorite is "A Book of Common Prayer" though. Peace from Matthew from SF.